"Where am I?" she croaked, coughing up sand that had lodged itself in her throat. Her heart raced wildly from the shock of her unexpected landing.
The gritty taste of sand filled her mouth, and her throat burned from the screams she had let out just moments before.
"This isn't my dorm, where the hell have I landed?" she exclaimed, glancing around in confusion.
Her body ached from the impact with the ground, but thankfully, her bones seemed intact, save for a few scratches scattered across her skin.
Pushing herself up, her hands sank into the loose, shifting sand beneath her.
She brushed off the grains that clung stubbornly to her clothes, swearing under her breath about the weirdest situation she had ever found herself in.
"F*ck, my life is over now," she muttered, the curse slipping out almost involuntarily.
The sky above her was unlike anything she had ever seen. It wasn't the deep indigo of night but rather a swirling mix of purples and greens, reminiscent of oil gliding on water.
There was no sun, no stars, just an eerie glow that cast everything in a sickly light.
The horizon stretched endlessly, interrupted only by jagged pillars of obsidian jutting upwards, their surfaces gleaming as they caught the strange light.
Floating between these pillars were bizarre pieces of debris: a child's bicycle frozen mid-fall, a shattered mirror reflecting the trapped glow, and a lone doorframe standing tall, disconnected from any walls.
"What the hell is this world?" she muttered, fear and confusion swirling in her mind.
Just moments ago, she had been safe in her dorm, and now she was in this surreal place.
Her last memory flickered a mysterious cube with an inscription, and then she had been sucked through some kind of portal tearing through space and time.
"Where is the cube?" she suddenly recalled, the thought sparking her memory.
She scanned her surroundings, hoping for a sign of the enigmatic artifact that had brought her here, but all she saw was an endless, dark desert glowing ominously in the distance.
She started walking. Time seemed irrelevant here; her phone was dead, and her watch was frozen at 9:47 PM, the exact moment she had been in her dorm.
"Even my watch doesn't work," she thought with frustration.
"If I can find that cube, maybe I can escape this creepy world." She muttered to herself, but the silence around her responded with nothing.
Again, she took in the bizarre terrain. Where was she supposed to go now?
Examining her surroundings further only deepened her confusion.
To her left, the gravel sparkled like shattered glass, bursting with colors like fireworks.
To her right, an enormous staircase of clothing spiraled up toward the endless sky, and straight ahead lay a sea of ash that appeared to stretch infinitely.
Each option seemed worse than the last, but she had to choose one. After a moment of deep contemplation and heavy breaths, she made her decision.
She glanced toward the left, where the sparkling gravel beckoned her.
"No other option but to either make it out alive or die trying," she resolved, taking her first step into what felt like a dangerous journey.
She couldn't remember how long she had been walking for hours.
Days? Time lost all meaning as her body moved forward on autopilot.
She replayed in her mind the countless times she had narrowly escaped danger in this bizarre place.
Once, she had almost plunged into a pit filled with crystallized shards, narrowly pulling her leg back just in time.
Yet, hunger gnawed at her insides, and thirst was becoming unbearable. She licked her lips, tasting salt, as if the very air was leaching moisture from her body.
"Hello? Is anyone here? Anyone, please?!" she shouted, her voice echoing flatly in the emptiness, as if the void had swallowed it whole. No echo. No reply.
"Am I going to die in this middle-of-nowhere place, with no way out..." she thought, when suddenly, something caught her eye.
In the distance, she spied something that she swore hadn't been there moments ago: a crumbling school desk drifting lazily overhead.
Its wood was warped and stained with ink, giving it an air of mystery that inexplicably drew her in.
Ha-eun jumped up and grasped its leg, determined to pull it down. The instant her fingers made contact, the world rippled around her.
In that strange moment, she caught a glimpse of another version of herself, not sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat, but with her hair in twin braids.
A younger, gentler version of her mother appeared, handing them both tangerines and sighing contentedly, "My two daughters." The other girl grinned, proudly displaying a gap where Ha-eun had chipped her tooth when she was twelve.
"Unnie, let's trade!" the girl chirped, offering a candy bracelet.
Ha-eun recoiled, her heart sinking. "I'm an only child," she thought bitterly, the vision crumbling to ash before her eyes.
A moment earlier, she had noticed a wrecked bus hanging overhead, a haunting sight amidst the chaos.
Exhaustion weighed heavily on Ha-eun, dragging at her limbs. She collapsed against the rusted husk of the derelict bus, its windows shattered and seats gutted.
Shadows pulsed ominously within.
But then, she froze as a creature oozed from the wreckage, an outline of liquid smoke that rippled like static. A single glowing fissure split where its face should be, emitting a low, resonant hum. To her surprise, it didn't attack; it merely watched.
"What… what the heck are you?" she croaked, her energy sapped, leaving her shivering with fear yet inexplicably drawn to approach.
As the fissure widened, it produced a sound reminiscent of a dial-up modem screeching in an unfamiliar language. Ha-eun stumbled back, and in the blink of an eye, the creature vanished.
All that remained was a burned handprint on the bus seat, far too large to belong to a human.
"I am going to go crazy at this point, no wonder if I become like that."
In this surreal moment, surrounded by remnants of a world that felt both familiar and utterly alien, Ha-eun couldn't shake the feeling that she was on the brink of something colossal, something that would redefine her understanding of reality itself.
She stumbled upon a phantom convenience store suspended in a crater, its fluorescent lights buzzing ominously.
Inside, the shelves were lined with unlabeled cans and protein bars wrapped in static-fuzzed plastic.
An unmanned cash register rang endlessly in the background.
The first bite of a chocolate bar tasted like burnt hair and soy sauce. She gagged but managed to swallow it down.
Thirst forced her to lick the condensation off a crumpled soda can, the metallic tang making her shake.
Her reflection in a shard of mirror glass startled her hollow cheeks, eyes bruised with exhaustion, and hair matted with grime.
A cracked mirror lay half-buried in a field of withered sunflowers. Ha-eun hesitated before touching its frame.
Then, as if previously happened, the world ripened, but this time she saw not her younger self, but another, her adult form.
A Ha-eun in a lab coat stood atop a conference stage, her smile strained but triumphant. A banner read: "Dr. Lee Ha-eun: 2043 Quantum Entanglement Breakthrough." Colleagues cheered as she raised a trophy shaped like a Möbius strip.
"This proves consciousness can bridge parallel realities," her double declared.
The crowd erupted, but their faces melted mid-applause, skin sloughing into puddles of wax. The trophy warped into the cube.
Ha-eun shaken her hand back. The mirror shattered.
In that fleeting moment, she realized it was the source of all her problems
The cube.
She first spotted it at dusk, though there wasn't a sun to set, just an eerie twilight casting strange shadows.
The cube floated above a long-dry fountain, its surface adorned with glowing.
"Wait!" she exclaimed, feeling an insatiable urge to reach out.
She dashed toward the cube, but the ground betrayed her, crumbling beneath her feet.
Suddenly, she was plunged into a river of thick black sludge, its powerful current dragging her down into its depths.
Fear, unlike anything she'd ever known, clawed at her insides.
Her lungs screamed for air, the pain suffocating.
Just when she thought all hope was lost, a wave of heat enveloped her, igniting her skin with an agonizing burn that contrasted sharply with the icy grip of the sludge.
She fought her way to the surface, coughing up a tar-like liquid, only to find that the cube had vanished almost as if it were playing a cruel joke on her.
"Coward!" she yelled, but her voice only bounced back, swallowed by the empty void around her.
"Get back here before I kill you!" she shouted, but silence was her only answer. The cube was gone.
Determined not to lose her way, she began marking her path: 1, 2, 3… each number carved into the debris with her trembling fingers.
At Mark 17, she stumbled upon a child's backpack wedged into the hollow of a tree. Inside, she found a waterlogged math textbook (Korean, 1998 edition), a rusted pocketknife, and a Polaroid of a family picnic
Its faces are scratched out, leaving only haunting silhouettes.
By Mark 29, she discovered a wall covered in drawings, suspended sideways. Scrawled in shaky Hangul were the words:
"Don't pay attention… They're listening." The warning sent a chill down her spine, amplifying her anxiety.
At Mark 41, she heard an enchanting piano melody unlike anything she had experienced before. It drew her in, leading her to a grand piano half-buried in the sand.
To her astonishment, the keys played themselves, coated in a layer of algae, producing a hauntingly beautiful tune that echoed through the desolate landscape.
She knew she had to keep moving, but the cube and whatever else lay ahead kept her heart racing with both dread and an inexplicable sense of wonder.
A rotting doorframe stood alone in a desert of black sand. Ha-eun reached for the broken wood with her fingertips. As she turned around, she felt the darkness enveloping her, but then she saw something.
In a dimly lit room, the antique dealer sat hunched over his desk, a flickering candle casting dancing shadows on the walls.
An open journal lay beside him, the pages filled with his neat handwriting, crafted with a fountain pen as if he were signing a pact with something dark and sinister. But she could only catch glimpses of what he was writing.
# Day 217: It feeds on regret. I will not be its next meal.
# Day 403: I tried to destroy it. Now my wife doesn't recognize me.
# Day 612: I sold it to the girl. But I can't forgive myself for what I have done. This is the only way.
He opened the drawer of his old desk, revealing a glinting object that made her eyes squint as they adjusted to the sudden brightness. A chill ran down her spine, as if an electric current had jolted through her.
"Noo…" she screamed, even though she knew this was just a vision. But it was already too late.
He pressed a revolver to his head.
BANG.
Ha-eun gasped as the doorframe shattered into dust, unable to comprehend what had just happened.
"Why…" she cried, her voice tremulous with fear rather than anger.
"Why do you make my life so miserable? I didn't know about you!" Her voice echoed in the emptiness, but it was weak, fading away like a whisper on the wind.
The weight of his actions hung heavily in the air, leaving her feeling lost in a world that had become undefined and chaotic.
Not too long ago, though she couldn't quite remember when, Ha Eun spotted something familiar in the distance
a campfire.
She took off at full speed, her heart racing with hope.
But when she arrived, her excitement turned to confusion. Instead of a lively blaze, she found remnants of a campfire that had burned long ago, encircled by a ring of scorched stones.
The fire had been carefully tended to, but beside it lay a rusted knife engraved with strange symbols—ΔΣ—and a torn page from a textbook, stained with what looked like blood.
The words scribbled on the page were frantic, written in a hurried scrawl that sent shivers down her spine
"Time here is meaningless. Survival is the only thing I can do now. I don't know how long I'm going to live here, but what if I find the Architect? Maybe… maybe I can find my way back home. So I have to go to the abyss."
"Home," Ha Eun muttered, biting her lip. Her heart ached as if someone were squeezing it tight.
"I have to find a way to go home," she declared, rising with renewed determination as the fatigue washed away, replaced by a sense of purpose.
First I have to find the so-called abyss.she glaring her at endless sky as if it she can found abyss.
She clutched the blood-stained paper tightly, whispering to herself, "I have found the Architect; it's the only way… It's the only way…"
Yet, in the back of her mind, anxiety crept in. What if she couldn't find the Architect? What if she never made it home?
Ha Eun shook her head, forcing herself to focus on the present, her eyes drawn back to the blood-stained paper.
The handwriting wasn't as clear as she'd hoped—it was frantic and messy, which only deepened her worry.
"Whoever wrote this letter didn't even have a pen? Why would they write it in blood?" she wondered aloud, the weight of the situation pressing heavily on her.
Ha-eun pocketed the knife. Her hands shook was not from fear, but excitement.
"Okay," she told the silence, grinning through cracked lips. "Let's survive."
That night, or what passed for night, she curled up beneath a withered oak tree and hummed her father's favorite song:
My life is like a morning glory…"
Her voice cracked. She swallowed. Then, from the void, something hummed back.